Robust face detection for different chromatic illuminations

In this paper, we propose a robust face detection method in color images, and it is suitable for various faces and under different illuminations. The pre-processing is to convert the 3-D RGB color histogram into 2-D R-Y/B-Y color histogram and to introduce the concept of flesh tone. The second procedure is the kernel processing, which is 2-D color histogram normalization, to eliminate the: affine effect of the color histograms due to the illuminations changing. We propose the new standard flesh region by using statistics in the normalized domain, then extract the candidates of the flesh regions. And the post-processing is to use connected operators, some criterions and thresholds to obtain accurate face regions. Experimental results show that the face detection is successful and satisfactory for the synthetic images and the real images.